Obama’s Deficit Presidency & Failure’s Equal Outcome
April 14, 2011 Leave a comment
The Bard and a Blustery Blowhole
April 9, 2011 Leave a comment
It is Saturday afternoon and I am listening to Wynton Marsalis playing Stadust on his horn. I am drinking Sofie, a tart Belgian Style Ale from Goose Island and I am reading the current (May 2011) Vanity Fair. I am suddenly struck by an off-handed pejorative comment in a VF article (again).
The current Vanity Fair magazine issue contains a column by contributing editor John Heilpern. The “Out To Lunch” one page piece is titled Avon Calling. This sounds interesting. But, wait.
The article relates Heilpern’s recent interview of Professor Harold Bloom at Bloom’s home in New Haven. Bloom, a professor of humanities at Yale for the past 55 years, is a well-known Shakespeare scholar. He has studied and read Shakespeare’s work in great depth. His latest book, number 39 in a series of scholarly works is titled The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. (I am currently reading Bloom’s book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.)
In the interview Bloom’s talks about his respect for Shakespeare:
“If Shakespeare is not God, he told Heilpern, “I don’t know what God is.” And, regarding Shakespeare’s biographers, “Let me quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, best mind to come out of America: ‘Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare.’ In other words, don’t look for the man in the work; look for the work in the man. And stop speculating about his life.”
Further in the interview, Bloom: “All high concept Shakespeare directors should be shot a dawn,” Later, Heilpern mentions Al Pacino’s and F. Murray Abraham’s New York performances of Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) saying that Abraham is the greatest Shylock he’d ever seen. (Recently, March, Abraham was Shylock at the Bank of America Theatre in Chicago.)
The interview brushes on the topic of Falstaff. Bloom: “Sir John Falstaff…even more than Hamlet – and that’s saying something – he’s the most intelligent person in all of literature. He has the best mind, the best wit, the most beautiful laughing language. As my late friend the marvelous critic George Wilson Knight said about Hamlet, he’s the embassy of death. But Falstaff is life! Falstaff is blessing.”
Prince Hal and Falstaff’s banishment are mentioned and then Bloom says, “Falstaff sees through the all-powerful. ““He sees through everything. He’s the best possible guide to the state of the world today. Can you think of anyone more antithetical to the Fascism of the Tea Party than Sir John Falstaff?”
What?! Why the sniping Tea Party comment? Wait. I think I know why the old fart and gassy pontificator Bloom, learned disciple of Falstaff and urbane liberal, looks down upon the Tea Party from his ivory tower:
“He’s a drunk, a liar, and a cheat. Yet he’s been glowingly described as “the personification of England”. He’ll do anything with a debt but honour it, and makes light of accepting bribes from fit men and leading a troop of 150 decrepit soldiers to their deaths. Yet he’s also taken, at his own admiring estimate, as a great booster-jab of infectious liveliness: “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” He has a spectacular obesity problem and he’s referred to – with epic freedom from euphemism – as “that swoll’n parcel of dropsies”, “that stuff’d cloak-bag of guts”, “this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this hill of flesh” – a man who secretes sweat in such quantities that he “lards the lean earth as he walks along”. Yet his most prominent characteristic, according to many commentators, is his “jubilant brain”. Meet, if you will, Sir John Falstaff.”
O, the humanity!
The above quote from this web page.
Mordorian Madness
April 7, 2011 Leave a comment
Dear Government,
Even if you were to shut down due to a budget crisis our national debt never shuts down. In fact, our national debt continues to grow and mushroom. Soon, Middle Earth and the lives of men will be destroyed. This fact pleases The Dark Lord Sauron but not us Hobbits.
Destroy the Ring that controls you!
Sincerely,
Bilbo T. Baggins
The Writing on the Wall
April 5, 2011 Leave a comment
Ob-a-Man is running for re-election. This UberMan has never stopped campaigning (except while making hops and malt into Obama beer: PrezFez. He must be getting ready for another beer summit.).
It is said that he will gather one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000.00) to finance his campaign. (This money, put into the hands of the common folk, would do much to stimulate the economy. Ob’s ego is stimulated enough.)
Obama, the Enabler: “We can Win the Future… if you just keep buying the lottery tickets I’m selling!”; “Carpe pecunia!”
(Obamany: Asking your husband if you can spend more money than you as a couple will ever have in your life and telling him that your household will be better off for it! “Honey, let’s make the kids pay our bills. Today, we live!)
Obama: LOL, COL (cry out loud).
Mene Mene Tekel Upsharin
Presidential Musicology
March 19, 2011 Leave a comment
Obama: a muddled-mess; a Niebuhr-ian flip-flopper; a John Cage-ian adopter of chance procedures; a point neither here nor there.
The score calls for a PRESIDENT–
a man Sostenuto,
a Well-Tempered Clavier –
not a free-floating theological realist, not a pointilist nor a tempo rubato self-centered-ess and certainly not 4’33”.
Mr. Smith Goes Local
March 8, 2011 Leave a comment
Sadly lacking in our Republic:
The town square, the front porch, the square dance, the ice cream social, the church/town picnic…the three legged race.
Fever Pitch
February 24, 2011 Leave a comment
Demonstrative differences,
Placard positions held
Above eyes that do not see and
Ears that do not hear,
Become the Rhetoric of Pressure:
“We demand you recognize the truth of power.”
(Denigrating innuendo,
Self-serving solipsism
And proprietary ‘truth’,
Private property of the affixed,
Morphs into murder when
Scoped long enough.)
Folded arms –
The versus-versus of “WE”
/Block /“THEM” out.
*****
Tempest aside,
Demonstrative differences
Converge into community (> us v. them),
When the will to want truth
(Truth, as opposed to what my peers let me get away with saying)
Is also the will to embrace the other –
As “members one of another”
We “speak truth to our neighbor”.
Example given:
A demonstration of truth-love,
Fever pitched –
A baby, this Jesus, Son of Mary.
A Witness to what He has seen, to what He has heard
Of the Father.
© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved
Just A Small Slice of Cheese-Head Life
February 19, 2011 Leave a comment
“Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has demanded that state workers contribute roughly 5.8 percent of their wages toward their retirement. He wants them to pay for 12 percent of their health-care premiums. Those modest employee contributions would be the envy of many workers in the private sector. “
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-union-20110217,0,2260656,print.story
Pajamas Media » A Letter from a Fearfully Concerned Muslim
February 17, 2011 Leave a comment
“Just ponder how a third-rate community organizer — from the most incestuously corrupt political region in the U.S.; with a record of participation in the most vulgar gathering of Jeremiah Wright posing as a reverend, spouting Fanonian rhetoric and bigotry; with mentors such as the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers; channelling the teachings of Saul Alinsky and Rashid Khalidi of the Chomsky school of self-loathing and sophistry — could advance through the ranks of American politics at an astounding speed, with little or no record of experience in government, to become the 44th president. In one of my columns from 2008 for the Sun Media in Canada, I had written in disbelief, as I watched the primaries unfold, of how American voters could be so beguiled by a charlatan of the Harold Hill type from The Music Man and vote for Obama. I was wrong in my overestimation of reason and experience among American voters as a check on the naivete of the university crowd and the duplicity of Lenin’s “useful idiots” in free societies. One of the lessons from 2008, for me, is this: how can I now scold Egyptians for wanting freedom and democracy behind the banners of the Muslim Brotherhood when their experience with electoral politics is negligible, and their history of 7,000 years offer little guidance for what freedom requires — respect for the other and not mistaking freedom for licentiousness?”
Salim Mansur
Cindy Wity 